Last week, my wife and I went to go see Neko Case in concert. I’ve seen her play a few times (all were lovely), and this one was no exception (not that it’s important to this piece, but her pedal steel player Jon Rauhouse is masterful).

I learned that she was playing in Cincinnati when I was surfing the web on my iPad Mini. I went to the Ticketmaster site, bought the tickets and emailed my wife within a matter of minutes. I texted our babysitter to see if she’d watch the kids. I found a nice restaurant using Google and Yelp on my iPad, and used OpenTable to get a reservation.

While this amalgam of events may underwhelm as a narrative, they have one thing in common: they all occurred without a desktop computer.

The fact that my story is so pedestrian reinforces my point that “mobile first” is far more than a mantra for web optimization. It is now the way that consumers increasingly access and interact with digital content.

I don’t print recipes from the Food Network, I take my iPad into the kitchen. I rarely read email on my desktop, I read them in an app. I rarely access social media on my desktop, either. My kids watch Amazon Prime on their Kindle Fires, my wife watches TV in bed using the Time Warner Cable online stream. Point being, we require mobile optimization.

Less than 1% of all websites are responsive (scalable but otherwise no different than the version available for desktop browsers). (ref)

I could go on. The big takeaway is that the majority of adults perform some, most or all of their computing using a mobile device…. and businesses need to deal with that. But how?

What is “mobile first?”

“Mobile first” is a strategy for web design that involves distilling a web property to its most essential items and leaving non-essential items out. It’s somewhat analogous to lean manufacturing with its focus on efficiency, somewhat analogous to Joe Friday from the television show Dragnet imploring businesses to share: “just the facts.”

It’s not simply the acknowledgement that users are increasingly favoring their mobile devices. It requires understanding what customers want, what content you’re providing that is congruent or incongruent with their needs, and then ruthlessly editing to accomplish something simple yet meaningful. Overcoming inherent biases to achieve any of those is challenging, let alone all of them.

Once content has been mobile-optimized, design must be as well. Google recommends that webmasters adopt responsive design to this end. (ref) Responsive design requires more advanced programming to accomplish a “fluid-grid” design that scales graphics and photos to fit the screen of any device. Of course there are other considerations, such as using HTML5 in lieu of Flash (iOS doesn’t display Flash).

And if mobile first and responsive design aren’t enough, consider IBM’s important insight about mobile: internal and enterprise resources need to be optimized for mobile, too. From CRM to ERP to intranets, employees that have corporate mobile tools or who use their own devices (BYOD) increasingly need the same access to corporate resources via mobile that they have on a desktop computer.

When I think back to my career in logistics and manufacturing, maintaining the connectivity between remote desktop systems was a constant challenge. Adding mobile connectivity and security adds several more layers of complexity to the task.

The big picture is that mobile is a more convenient and cost-effective platform for users than traditional desktop computers. And massive mobile adoption is a reality that continues to snowball. Mobile optimization requires businesses to use tremendous resource and strategy in conception and implementation. “Mobile first” is easy to talk, but hard to do.

More disruption lies ahead.

Three potential disruptive forces are coming in the immediate future to skew digital consumption further towards mobile: Gen Z, wearable devices and Firefox OS. Let me explain these a little more in depth:

Gen Z are the generation of kids known as “digital natives” who have never known life without a computer. In nearly every measure of platform and device, Gen Z exceeds previous generations.

They have the highest penetration of cell phones and the highest penetration on nearly every social network (except for Pinterest and LinkedIn). They have been using cell phones to text since they were watching Hannah Montana, and consume as much or more of their media via YouTube and other digital channels than television (hopefully not following Hannah Montana as closely now).

The first wave of this generation are in college now and are the driving force behind the success of apps like Snapchat and Tumblr. It’s not bad enough that this generation is mobile, but their media consumption and buying habits deviate from other generations as well.

Google Glass rolled out this past year, and will be followed by a glut of different wearable mobile devices. Designing for Glass is “mobile first” to the extreme, with a very small amount of information able to be shared for any user.

This is going to be a huge challenge going forward, even more so as the technology becomes more affordable for mass consumption (when Glass is out of beta one estimate asserts that its $1500 price tag will drop to around $300).

So, in addition to the growing market for tablets and smartphones, another class of device is coming into the market that more or less performs the same function as a desktop computer (with the exception of very specialized tasks). And although the extent of the disruption is anyone’s guess, the enthusiasm for Google Glass leads one to suspect that its impact on mobile consumption will be far from trivial.

Finally: Firefox OS. If your last experience with Firefox was to shelve its browser in favor of Chrome, you would be in good company. You may be surprised to learn that the most recent work from Firefox is the development of an open source mobile operating system.This is significant because 46% of mobile operating systems are proprietary (primarily running iOS, but also Microsoft and Blackberry operating systems).

Here’s a statistic that I didn’t share earlier from the Pew study: likelihood of owning a mobile device increases with income level. The huge opportunity with Firefox OS is to make mobile more affordable. The conventional wisdom is that Firefox may challenge Android first in emerging markets where iOS doesn’t exist, but there is also enthusiasm in Europe and a bit in North America for the platform.

Firefox OS probably isn’t sufficiently funded to pose a huge threat to Android, but it may compete to improve the affordability and UX for lower-priced mobile devices. In other words, more people may be able to consume digital content because of it. Of course, THAT is a big deal.

For businesses, mobile is hiding in plain sight. Consider this post-concert Tweet:

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